I’ve often observed that the context for an image is very important. Put an image in a fashion magazine and I’ll think of it as a sales pitch for a brand or a designer. My instinct will be to look at the clothes and the model from an intellectual, not emotional, point of view. Advertisements are about selling things, so there’s an inherent degree of mistrust in the interaction. Put the same image in a femdom tumblr stream and it changes how I perceive it quite dramatically. I’ll start looking for and projecting D/s elements. I might spin little stories about the scene in my head. I may think of myself in the scene, or how I’d interact with the model. It’s exactly the same image I’d flip past in a copy of Vogue, but somehow somebody else labeling it as erotic and kinky gives me permission to do the same. It creates a far more emotional reaction.
The two shots below are examples of the kind of images I’m thinking about. I found them both on the Strangely Compelling tumblr. The first was a shot for Numero magazine by Greg Kadel. You can see more images from the shoot here. The second is from a sequence titled Orchidee Noir by the photographer Jose Herrera for Oxxo Magazine.
